


See How the Fates Their Gifts Allot

by Pun



Category: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 15:27:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17144312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pun/pseuds/Pun
Summary: Mori's idea of a present.





	See How the Fates Their Gifts Allot

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theblueescapist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theblueescapist/gifts).



LONDON, NOVEMBER 1884

The sheets beside him were empty and cold when Thaniel woke, and when he went downstairs he found a note from Mori saying there were currant scones in the oven and not to expect him back before half past 11.

Thaniel was annoyed, and then annoyed at himself for being annoyed, not sure what he had expected. There was a card from Annabel, at least, with a drawing of a woman in a blue gown surrounded by golden wheat. _Happy Birthday to a wonderful brother_ , she’d written, unusually maudlin for her, and she’d made the boys sign it too.Thaniel felt she was sending a message, trying to let him know that he was forgiven for not having married rich after all.

A scream like a lightning flash broke the stillness. Thaniel couldn’t say how he knew it was Six. Certainly she had never so much as raised her voice in the weeks she’d been living at Filigree Street, let alone let out a shriek like he’d just heard. He ran into the back garden where he found her yelling and giving chase to the oldest Haverly boy. There was blood on her face.

A powerful feeling of anger unlike he’d ever experienced rolled from the soles of Thaniel’s feet up through his body. He intercepted the Haverly boy—Alfred, Thaniel had heard his mother calling him—where he was trying to scramble back over the fence.

Thaniel grabbed him by the arm, hard, and only just resisted the urge to box his ears. “What happened? What have you done to her?” 

Alfred looked more defiant than scared, glaring up at Thaniel with a look that put him in mind of Yuki, mulish and irritated.

Thaniel looked back at Six who was frozen, watching him with a wary expression. An alarming amount of blood was flowing from a cut on her temple down side of her face and dripping into the collar of her coat.

“You’re getting too old to be fighting with girls, Alfred. I’ll not tell you again.” Thaniel dropped the boy’s arm, and he was gone in a flash.

There were linens in the hall cupboard. Thaniel brought them to the kitchen where he used them to staunch the flow of blood and clean and bandage a dry-eyed and quiet Six. He used the same brass basin Mori had used to clean Thaniel’s wound the night they met. It looked just the same as it had then, filled with murky red water, although now it was Six’s blood. The anger was still skittering around under his skin like spiders in the walls, and Thaniel didn’t know what to do with it.

“What happened, then?” He asked Six, finally.

“He snuck up on me. I was watching the fairies, and he hit me hard on my back so that I fell and the rock cut me. I’m fast. He could never have caught me, if I’d seen him.”

“No,” Thaniel agreed. “No, he couldn’t.”

*

When Mori got home Thaniel was waiting for him. “You knew. When you told her to dunk him in the river. You knew he’d retaliate.”

“She’s not badly hurt, and now she knows you’re on her side. It’s what you wanted.”

“I’m due at the Savoy in--” Thaniel reached into his pocket to consult his watch. The watch that he’d found in his room exactly one year ago. Thaniel thought of unlatched doors and out of tune piano strings and said, “This was meant as a birthday present.”

“I couldn’t say for sure when it would happen. There’s a new suit for you being delivered this afternoon. But . . . yes.”

The feelings swirling in Thaniel’s chest were like one of Mori’s weather vials ready to release a storm if he broke it open. He checked his first impulse which was to say he didn’t want the suit either. Instead he said he’d be home by six and left. The wind made him wince with a cold that bordered on pain. He’d forgotten his scarf.

*

The suit was a lovely dark blue in a thick fabric that was so smooth it almost shined in the electric light. The jacket was lined with white satin, and there was a Japanese label at the collar.

Thaniel had lingered at the piano after rehearsal. Chopin’s prelude in G minor followed by some of Tchaikovsky’s 4th had worked out most of the anger, and when Six took his hand to lead him to the kitchen to see his cake, that dispelled the rest. 

The cake was three layers, frosted in the colors of “Ode to Joy” with “Happy Birthday Thaniel” written in D sharp yellow. 

The white bandage around her head made Six look even smaller than usual. Mori must have redone it because it was tied more neatly than Thaniel had done. She knelt on a chair and leaned both elbows on the table, eying the cake hungrily. “Can Six have a piece?”

“Of course you can. I’ve told you, you don’t have to earn your food here.” He shot Mori a reproving look over her head.

“But orphans don’t have birthdays.” It had the air of a pronouncement she’d been told by Matron. Usually these were on the subject of idleness or gluttony. 

“Once again Matron’s understanding of biology is suspect. Everyone has a birthday,” Mori corrected. “You don’t know yours, but there is a day you were born like everyone else.”

“Six wants a birthday.” She had mostly been broken of the habit of speaking in the third person, but Thaniel noticed she lapsed into it at times when she thought she was going to be punished or denied something she wanted. 

“I don’t suppose you know . . .” Thaniel asked Mori.

“No one intends to have a baby on any particular day,” he said.

“That’s true. I suppose we could choose one.” It felt wrong, somehow, just to pick a birthday. “Flip a coin?”

Mori cocked his head, considering. “I have an idea.” 

He went to the workshop and came back with a pair of curious dice. Upon inspection, Thaniel realized that they were twelve-sided. 

He demonstrated for Six that she should roll the two together for the date, then one for the month then placed them in her hands. 

Six’s expression was solemn, her small hands barely able to encompass the two dice together as she shook them for the first roll.

Both landed on three. Six’s face lit up when Mori told her this meant that her birthday would be on the sixth day of the month to be determined on her next roll.

The next roll came up a three.

“Sixth of March,” she repeated proudly after Mori told her that would be the date of her birthday. “My birthday is sixth of March. Will I have a cake as well?”

“If you like. You have time to think it over. Perhaps you’d rather a tart. I’ll make whatever you’d like.” Six’s eyes widened at the thought of this much power, and Mori smiled.

Later, Mori made them tea which they drank in the kitchen because Six was asleep in the parlour. Thaniel warmed his hands on the cup and inhaled the comforting scent of green tea. He had thanked Mori for the suit, but he thanked him again. “It’s lovely. I’ll hardly be able to wear it for fear of spilling food on it, or getting a tear.

A silence followed and Thaniel thanked him for the cake as well to fill it. He felt he ought to say something more about Six, but he wasn’t certain what or how. Finally, he said, “But you must have known I’d be angry. You don’t have to be a seer to know that I’d rather she not lose a pint of blood on account of me.” 

“Yes, I suppose I must have known, but I couldn’t remember--” He broke off, and Thaniel knew he had come to one of those blank places where the future had changed, and he couldn’t say how. “I thought this was more important,” he said slowly. “And I didn’t remember what it was like for you to be angry with me. I forgot that it would matter.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Thaniel told him, which wasn’t quite true, but Mori’s mouth was warm and sweet when he kissed him, and the kiss was true.


End file.
